Latest editorial
Ian Austin
by Nana Backland, Merseyside Morning Star Readers & Supporters Group
The Tories introduced the 50% strike ballot threshold to make industrial action harder. MATT WRACK argues that a Labour government has no justification for leaving it on the statute book
In the wake of Ann Widdecombe’s murder, JOHN GREEN wonders whether the government will really get to grips with the root cause of these attacks on our MPs
The new PM’s opening addresses offered hope, council homes and reform — but little detail on how any of it will be delivered, warns CLAUDIA WEBBE
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
IN AUGUST 2019 Ian Austin set up Mainstream, a campaign to “encourage a return to respectable and responsible politics and to banish extremism from British politics once and for all.” Austin recommended voting for Johnson’s Conservatives and against Corbyn’s Labour Party.
Mainstream was a relatively low-budget affair, spending just £134,000 in the 2019 election. But it got incredible bang for its buck.
Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Communication and Culture tallied which political figures attracted the most coverage in national TV news and national newspapers during the election: Ian Austin came in at number 11, just pipping Michael Gove. There was a media enthusiasm, it seems, for an ex-Labour MP denouncing Labour — and Mainstream gave Austin a platform.
Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
It is rather strange that Labour continues to give prestigious roles to inappropriate, controversy-mired businessmen who are also major Tory donors. What could Labour possibly be hoping to get out of it, asks SOLOMON HUGHES
Starmer sabotaged Labour with his second referendum campaign, mobilising a liberal backlash that sincerely felt progressive ideals were at stake — but the EU was then and is now an entity Britain should have nothing to do with, explains NICK WRIGHT
SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests